The England coach accepted with good grace the joke present handed over by defence coach Paul Gustard in front of the squad at their Pennyhill Park base after the hotel-room fall which left him with the mother of all shiners.

The Trump comparison, made on the eve of the RBS Six Nations by former Scotland and Lions coach Jim Telfer, will not have gone down so well.

Jones’s stewardship of England may have made the adopted Australian a national treasure, but his popularity evidently does extend north of the border.

For Telfer, Jones’s priority list for this season’s championship – setpiece, defence and attack, in that order – is far too conservative 13 months and 13 wins into his reign.

“Eddie Jones doesn’t want to beat teams, he wants to demolish them, which I find a bit disappointing,” said Telfer. “To me, he’s building his whole team on set-piece and the building of the attack comes secondary.

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Eddie Jones was compared to Donald Trump by Jim Telfer

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Jim Telfer believes Eddie Jones should show more respect to the opposition

“Having coached Australia and Japan you would have thought the opposite would be the case.

“The way he speaks, it’s a bit like Donald Trump. He wants to be the big man, you know?

“His goal is to win the World Cup in 2019 and so far it’s gone well, but he could be a little more circumspect, show a bit more respect for the opposition. He doesn’t seem to show much respect and it could come back to bite him.”

The Trump comparison is, of course, fatuous. One is an undiplomatic outsider with an eye for a headline and an acidic tongue and the other is….well perhaps best not to head down that line.

Jones’s mission is to win matches not friends and in making England great again, their battered commander-in-chief has certainly rubbed Telfer up the wrong way.

England get their Six Nations campaign underway this Saturday against France

England Rugby's 14-game winning streak
Fri, January 6, 2017

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England won every single match they played throughout 2016, and are currently on a 14-game winning run dating back to October 2015

As England prepared for the opening of their campaign against France at Twickenham on Saturday, Telfer widened the attack to English rugby’s support base.

“If you ever think about wanting separation from England just sit ten minutes in Twickenham and listen to them,” railed Telfer, to BBC online.

“They think they’re superior and a lot of them will come from the south-east – bags of money and bags of this and bags of that. They don’t really appreciate the other team.

“In France they just boo the other team, in Argentina they boo the other team, in England it’s just disdain. ‘Why are we playing these plebs?’

“I don’t like Twickenham; a concrete jungle, nothing attractive about it at all.”

Neither do France having not won a Six Nations match there since 2005. Guy Noves’s side have though had the luxury of the same preparation time as England for the game this year having wrung player release concessions out of the Top 14 clubs.

They have their injury problems but then again so do England. Even allowing for Joe Marler’s welcome recovery, Jones’s pack will still miss the Vunipola brothers and Chris Robshaw.

Courtney Lawes, competing with Joe Launchbury and George Kruis for a second-row berth, moved yesterday to assuage any fears among England’s supporters.

“The fans were worried before the autumn that George Kruis and Maro Itoje weren’t fit but the strength in depth in the Premiership nowadays means that if someone gets struck down then someone with similar skills or different skills will come in and fill that role. We’ve got so many good players,” said Lawes.

There are some gleaming baubles dangling in front of Jones’s England. They stand on the verge of a national record number of consecutive wins and could become the first side to win back-to-back Grand Slams in the Six Nations era. But with four days to go until the show opens against the French they are zoned in on one aim.

“We want to play a perfect game of rugby,” said Lawes. “That’s probably not going to happen but that is our goal. We want to be brilliant at the basics – that’s what our emphasis has been on all week and all last week. We are going to know our game plan and we just want to execute it to the best of our ability.”